Besucheradresse: A 5, Bauteil A 68159 Mannheim Telefon 06 21 / 1 81-2098 Telefax 06 21 / 1 81-2099 jvdeth@uni-mannheim.de Sekretariat: Telefon 06 21 / 1 81-2097 www.sowi.uni-mannheim.de/ lehrstuehle/lspwivs Report on the Doctoral Thesis Between Contestation and Consensus: How Context Matters for Non-electoral Political Participation in Western Democracies by Kateřina Vráblíková Masaryk University, Faculty of Social Studies, Brno June 05 2012 Without citizens’ participation democracy does not deserve its name. Probably no topic attracted so much attention in empirical research in the last six or seven decades as the question how and why people get involved in politics. From the early days of voting research in the 1940s to the spread of the Civic Voluntarism Model in the 1990s individual resources and motivations were strongly favoured to answer this question. Although attention is paid to contextual factors related to economic development, the rise of specific issues, the saliency of political campaigns, the qualities of civil society or the impact of mass media it is clear that political participation still is mainly explained by referring to individual resources and motivations. The fact that evident cross- national differences in political participation hardly can be counted for in this way is usually simply neglected. In her doctoral thesis Kateřina Vráblíková argues that two specific attributes of the political system are relevant for the explanation of political participation. Following the seminal work of Robert Dahl citizens are expected to be more engaged if a system is: (1) more competitive and offers more opportunities to form an opposition (“contestation”), and (2) offers broad access to all citizens (“inclusiveness”). Contrary to available interpretations, Ms Vráblíková suggests that high scores on both dimensions are required for relative high levels of political participation. Focussing on institutional features of political systems her main research question is: “How does the context of the political system influence individual non-electoral participation in Western democracies?” (p. 2). In order to answer this question she mainly uses data from the ISSP-2004 module on “Citizenship”, which contains information on political participation for more than 38,000 people in 29 democracies. In addition, institutional features of these countries are derived from a number of available databases. The main argument of the thesis and the research design (including reasons for the need to test various rival interpretations and the use of multi-level modelling) are clearly presented in the introduction (Ch. 1). Before examining specific explanations, Ms Vráblíková considers the conceptualization of “non-electoral modes of political